How spectacles, the mechanical clock and the windmill were all invented in thirteenth century Europe

How ideas from the Far East, like printing, gunpowder and the compass were taken further by medieval Europeans than the Chinese had imagined possible

The extraordinary leaps in scientific thought made at the universities of Oxford and Paris in the fourteenth century -- including important discoveries about the implications of the earth's rotation and the motion of accelerating objects

The myth of Church opposition: How many of the most significant contributors to medieval science became bishops or cardinals

How Copernicus's sun-centered universe, Kepler's optics and Galileo's mechanics all owed their inspiration and much of their detail to medieval antecedents

How medieval scholars overturned much of the false scientific wisdom inherited from the ancient Greeks

The surprising amount a well-educated medieval person would know about "natural philosophy"

How the West recovered the lost heritage of ancient Greek learning from Arab and Byzantine sources

How St. Thomas Aquinas "Christianized" Greek philosophy, allowing medieval scholars to build on it

How new inventions in the late Middle Ages had a profound effect on European society and, thanks to the voyages of Columbus and others, the rest of the world as well

How the Renaissance, often associated with the beginning of modernity, saw a surge in magical belief that especially affected those at the cutting edge of science